


No Postcode Envy

by specialrhino



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Once Upon a Time (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, background science bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-04 10:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/specialrhino/pseuds/specialrhino
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was magical-brainwashing-staffs-from-outerspace magic, and then there was fairytale-characters-all-living-in-one-town magic. As far as Bruce was concerned, the existence of the first did not make the second credible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Postcode Envy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hilarious and amazing Into a Bar challenge over at livejournal. Endless thanks to glovered, who read this over with me once, and then again when my computer died and I had to rewrite it.

Tuesday found Bruce sitting in a small-town cafe-cum-diner. He wasn’t sure which town, and he hadn’t bothered to learn the name of the diner, either. New England was gorgeous in Autumn, but the sunny day was crisp and he’d wanted a warm place to sit for a while. As it was, a gust of cold air washed over Bruce any time someone entered or exited the building.

He was attempting to blend in, and to that end was hunched over in a way he’d honed over the years to discourage being approached by strangers. He was thus surprised when he noticed someone approaching his table out of the corner of his eye. It couldn’t be the check, because even though he'd spent the last ten minutes pushing a tomato around with his fork, his burger sat half eaten on the plate.

But it was the waitress, after all. As Bruce opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t finished, she put a mug down on the table in front of him. An ungainly spiral of whipped cream dusted with cinnamon protruded from its mystery depths.

He ran a hand through his hair. "Uh, that's not -"

"Enjoy, sweetcheeks." She winked at him and walked away.

Even after half an hour of people watching in the diner, her friendliness still caught him off-guard. He’d only been in New York City for half a year, but he had quickly adjusted to being resolutely ignored by strangers. Bruce had almost left the diner immediately upon entering when she seemed to be flirting with him, but it became quickly apparent that she smized at all of her customers, so he’d merely followed her to the table and hidden behind a menu.

He much preferred New York. At first he was uneasy at living in a densely populated area, but he soon realized that if you kept walking, people would leave you completely alone. Unarmed civilians putting themselves in his way set his teeth on edge, no matter how long it had been since he had last been smized.

Bruce glanced around the room, hoping to locate whoever bought him hot chocolate and glare at them.

In so doing, he caught the eye of a 10-year-old kid wearing an oxford buttoned to the top and a cardigan that wouldn't look out of place on a stuffy, British professor. Said kid took Bruce’s confusion as invitation and walked over and slid into the booth across from him.

"Hello," the kid said. 

"Uh, kid -" said Bruce.

"Henry," said Henry. He looked patiently expectant, as if it was perfectly safe and normal to approach strangers and expect them to comply with his whims. 

Bruce ran his hand through his hair in dismay. The longer his hair was, the fluffier it got, which maybe made him seem harmless and approachable. That would explain why children and small, defenseless animals seemed particularly taken with him. They were the last things that should be near him.

He was too dangerous and too old for this shit, he thought to himself, and resolved to go to a barber when he got back to New York.

“Go on,” Henry said, nodding at the mug. “You look like you need it."

Bruce sighed, causing some of the cinnamon atop his mystery drink to disperse into the air. He pushed the mug away from him a bit. It was warm through the thick, cream-colored ceramic. "Look, Henry-" Henry pushed the mug back in Bruce's direction. "- not that this isn't nice of you, but -"

"It's okay,” said Henry. “I know how it is. My mom is pretty high-strung, and my other mom gets stressed out easily. There is almost nothing hot chocolate with whipped cream and cinnamon can't solve!" When Bruce didn't immediately cave and pick up the drink, Henry widened his eyes and said earnestly, "Don't worry, it's not poisoned or anything. But definitely don’t take apple cider...from anyone! That’s pretty important to remember."

Bruce looked at the kid, looked to the drink, and then stared at the kid some more.

Henry proffered a gold credit card and waved it around. "I got you, don't worry."

If Bruce weren’t virtually indestructible, this would have given him pause. But as it was, it didn’t look like the kid was going anywhere until he gave in. He wrapped his hands around the mug. He took a tentative sip, and then a larger one immediately after. This wasn't ovaltine, or chocolate syrup, or made with water. This was the real stuff. It warmed him from the inside out and was definitely worth the undignified smudge of whipped cream he could feel on the tip of his nose.

"Thanks, kid," he said, smiling to himself as he wiped his nose with a napkin.

Henry nodded sagely and accepted his dues. "So, who are you?"

"Bruce. Bruce Banner."

"No, I mean, who were you on the other side."

What. "What?"

"You know, in Fairytale Land."

It was maybe rude to look at someone who bought you a drink like they were crazy but, well, this kid was talking crazy.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm just passing through."

Henry's jaw dropped. "You're not from Storybrooke? How did you get through the barrier?"

Bruce hadn’t seen any walls as he walked into town - Storybrooke, apparently - but if there was one farther out, the Other Guy had probably had no problem smashing through it. All Bruce knew for certain was that an hour ago, he’d had woken up in the middle of the forest in Somewhere, New England, amid the wreckage of a log cabin. He didn't know which was more cliché - the actual log walls of the cabin, or the statistical improbability of the Other Guy wrecking the one building in a huge forest.

He had muttered an apology into the still, forest air and rummaged around the debris for something to wear.

But Bruce couldn’t go into an explanation of how he occasionally turned into a huge, green rage-monster -- Tony’s favourite phrasing -- so he changed the subject. "Shouldn't you be in school right now?" He looked pointedly at the kid's backpack. Bruce was reasonably certain today was a Tuesday. The Other Guy rarely took the reins for more than a handful of hours at a time.

Whatever hurried lie the kid was about construct, Bruce didn't get to hear it. Instead, he heard the double beep that indicated a transmission from one of the other Avengers. Tony had somehow designed him a communicator that stayed in his ear through his Hulking Out.

Bruce held up a finger to silence Henry and tapped his ear. People usually assumed it was a bluetooth device.

The distracted voice of Tony Stark soon filled his ear. "Hey buddy, how's Maine?" So that's where he was. Bruce didn't even bother responding with how creepy it was when Jarvis tracked him down, because he recognized that tone of voice. Tony barely left enough space in between words when he was like this, so it was nigh impossible to get a word in edgewise unless you were Pepper. "You ready to go?"

Bruce looked down at the dregs of his hot chocolate. "Yeah." It was basically empty, but he upended the mug to drain it of all but the sluggish chocolatey sediment at the bottom.

"See you soon, sweetums," said Tony and hung up. Tony always threw out sarcastic endearments left and right, as if being carelessly affectionate often enough would mask the fact that he sincerely cared for his friends, few though they were.

Bruce had gotten used to this, along with the other panoply quirks of one Tony Stark in the past few months he’d spent working at Stark Tower. He often accused Tony of keeping him around because he was the only guy shorter than him in all of NYC, but that was a lie, they both knew it. He’d heard that even the Other Guy saved Iron Man from time to time. He hoped that said everything he needed to.  
Call done, drink finished, he got up and threw some money on the table - found in the pocket of his stolen jeans, hopefully it was enough to cover his half eaten burger.

He waved goodbye to Henry.

"Thanks." He paused in the doorway where the cold air mixed with the warm interior and looked back at the kid who was obviously ditching school, obviously didn’t have many friends his own age either. "You should get your moms some Vata tea,” he told him. “It’s a pretty good de-stressor, as well."

Henry smiled and gave him a thumbs up. 

Bruce started down the quaint street. On principle, he would not typically trust a child wearing slacks, but as Bruce stepped out from under the rosy bower in the front of the cafe, he noticed the smell of fresh bread in the air from the small bakery across the street, walked past a nice library on the corner, and he felt much more content than when he’d walked in. That kid had been pretty okay.

Then Bruce remembered about Tony’s forgetfulness and spotty sense of time and sped up to a brisk powerwalk. Tony probably sent the jet half an hour ago before they talked on the phone and forgot to tell him about it, so he had about twenty minutes to walk as far away from the town as possible. Jarvis would find him, wherever he was, but the last thing this small town wanted was a jet landing on the cute pawn shop with the nice old man peering out the window. Nothing of Tony Stark’s belonged in a quiet place like this.

 

 

His minibreak in New England was just a blip in his new life as an Avenger, and upon returning to New York, Bruce immediately buried himself in work. He watched romcoms with Pepper. He drank calming tea so that he didn’t destroy any more Abraham Lincoln-style vacation homes. He forgot all about Maine and the quiet town of Storybrooke and fell back into routine.

Before joining the Avengers Initiative, he’d known he would never have anything approaching an ordinary life, never have many friends or any family, but now he finally had a purpose. He’d felt useful as a doctor, but it was a lot faster to clear away the red in his ledger by saving hundreds of people at a time than by patching up patients one by one. Not to mention, here he got to return to his research, with funding that had proved scarily unlimited so far. He wasn’t going to ask.

So after years of working so hard to fall off the grid, to secret himself away to a place where no one knew or remembered him, he’d caved at the first offer of companionship and a clean workplace. It had taken an embarrassingly short time for Bruce to accept his new role as Tony Stark’s kept friend and sometimes defender of New York.

His life now mostly consisted of commuting from the lab to Central Park - most battles against bad guys tended to end up there, for some reason - and back to the lab. He was waiting for the NMR machine to finish up with some samples the weekend after yet another fight prompting him to make such a commute when something out of the ordinary happened - his phone rang.

He maybe wouldn't have noticed over his deep concentration paired with the music, but that morning he’d finally gotten Tony to turn Black Sabbath down to medium volume.

He looked around the room thinking maybe Tony had left his music on and was calling him from across the room, but Tony was standing at the far corner table, busy bopping his head along to the music and welding something to the inside of – was that his toaster?

Bruce clicked ‘answer’ and held the phone up to his ear.

"Hello?" he said cautiously. He hoped it wasn’t sort of bad guy or, worse, paparazzi.

"Hello, it's Henry!" a voice said tinnily through the phone.

“Who?”

Bruce pulled the Starkphone away from his ear to look at the screen. Apparently the call was coming from Maine, although there wasn't a town listed. Weird, Jarvis usually labelled things very specifically.

As he put the phone back to his ear, he heard: " _Henry_ -Henry!"

Realization dawned on Bruce in the memory of a diner, soggy tomatoes, and a hell of a weird day. Henry barreled on before he could ask how the kid had got his number. "I saw you on TV. You looked stressed. Are you okay?"

Tony had turned to frown at Bruce from across the room. He mouthed, _Who is that?_ Bruce shook his head and gestured for him to turn the music down further. Tony turned it up. Bruce pulled a face, gathered a few of his files and headed for the door.

Bruce shouldered the door open and shouted into the phone, "Are you sure you should be talking to me? Now that you know I'm dangerous."

In the quiet of the corridor, he could practically hear Henry roll his eyes. "My mom's the Evil Queen -” Was Bruce supposed to know which one he meant? Given the number of evil queens in fairy tales, that was pretty vague. “- and she’s okay, these days. It’s not like you’re using magic, or anything,” Henry scoffed, then asked, “Wait, you're not, are you?"

There was magical-brainwashing-staffs-from-outerspace magic, and then there was fairytale-characters-all-living-in-one-town magic. The existence of the first did not make the second credible. Bruce decided to humor him. "Not magic, just science. Uh, do we need to talk about why you think your mom is evil?"

He felt a little bad for hoping the kid would say no, but, as he had repeatedly and to no avail explained to Tony, he wasn't _that_ kind of doctor.

"No, it's pretty cut and dry. Even if she hadn't tried to kill Snow White - " Ah, _that_ evil queen, " - she still has that vault of human hearts."

There was a pause as Bruce tried to come up with an appropriate response. What do you say to that kind of thing?

Bruce busied himself hitting the elevator button for the ground floor - he could have covered the mouthpiece and asked JARVIS, but it was still a little creepy to do simple tasks via AI. "Is there, uh, anything else you called me for, Henry?"

This time the pause came from Henry's end and sounded furtive. Bruce knew these things - after spending so much time around stoic SHIELD employees, he was learning the nuances of silence.  
"It's not that I wouldn't have called you anyway -" Henry spoke quickly enough that some of his words ran into one another. "- but for school we're supposed to interview someone about their job. So I decided to call you."

“Uh, what?”

“Your _job_. What do you _do_?”

“This is for a career day or something?”

“Are you a spy? At Granny’s Diner you were wearing a shirt with ruffles and cowboy boots. Were you in disguise?”

"No-” Bruce said. “No I, I'm a scientist, not a spy, and that wasn’t my shirt, it was some other guy’s-"  
The suit that had entered the elevator on the tenth floor side-eyed him. The doors dinged open and Bruce escaped into the lobby.

"My mom says you look like the pizza guy," Henry told him.

Bruce dragged his hand across his face and sighed. All of the news outlets kept using the same terrible photo of him, the one from his grad student ID he had taken whilst hungover. He suspected it was Director Fury's retaliation for Bruce's refusal to play along with any of SHIELD's PR schemes.

“Is there a reason you’re not interviewing her instead?" he asked, pushing open the spotless glass doors and walking outside. Bruce needed to walk when he was on the phone - it helped him think, and strolling down the streets of Manhattan beat pacing in the apartment in Stark Tower Tony had insisted was his.  
"Well, most people don’t like my mom. And she tried to kill my teacher."

Bruce stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, got jostled by a few people, and mechanically resumed walking. He didn’t know what kind of movies this kid’s mom let him watch, but he should probably stop watching them.

Henry took his silence for interest, and blithely continued, "Ms Margaret is technically my grandmother, but my moms say that if she wants to act like that, it would be nepa- nepo - that I shouldn't be in her class, and -"

Bruce cut him off. "What does your mom do again?"

"She's the Mayor."

“Right.” Wasn't Mayor an elected position? If she wasn’t popular, why was she in charge? 

Henry barrelled on, though, so Bruce couldn’t ask. "My other mom used to be some kind of bounty hunter? I think? But I'm not going to interview her because the last time I asked her about the past she lied and told me my dad was dead so I don't want to ask her but another kid in my class is already interviewing Ruby, and Graham is dead and August turned into wood, and mom says never talk to strangers or Mr Gold, even though he's kind of my grandpa." Henry said this all in one breath.

Rather than trying to parse any of that, Bruce decided to ignore it. All of it. Clearly he should stop asking this kid personal questions.

"So, uh,” he said instead. “Do you have any questions prepared?"

“No.”

“Ok, job things, job things,” he cast around. He caught a reflection of himself in a building window and said, “Well, I used to be a doctor. But then I got … uh, chosen for a project...a bunch of projects, and now I do a lot of search and rescue?”

“Like a firefighter. I thought for a while that my dad had been a firefighter.”

“Yeah. Like that. But with more science and breaking stuff. I’m at a point in life where I think I have more to offer by destroying things than fixing them?” Bruce said, and then paused. Wait, that wasn’t good advice.

Luckily, Henry missed it. “What did you say? My phone went crackly for a second.”

“Nevermind. What do you know about particle physics?”

Bruce spent the next hour wandering the streets of New York while explaining particle physics - albeit in deeply simplified terms - being a doctor and fighting crime. It was kind of…fun. A pleasant distraction, at least. Henry reminded him of one of Betty's nephews and the last time he'd gotten to see her family. He waited for the wave of sadness and guilt that typically came after thinking about Betty, but the day was so nice that he couldn’t even bring himself to feel bad.

It was only after he returned to Stark Tower, after a quick stop for custard and a mosey down Broadway, that he realized he had gone outside and for once ended up somewhere other than Central Park.

 

 

A month later, Bruce was having a terrible day. Witches had attacked New York, science witches with hi-tech flying brooms, and the ensuing battle was long enough that several news stations had had time to send over their people.

Even on the best of days Bruce avoided cameras and the nosy reporters. Of course, any day Bruce spent outside typically resulted in him buck naked in a public park, often splattered with someone else’s blood, so really there was no day he was in the mood to be interviewed.

So when the Other Guy relinquished control after the witch battle, Bruce promptly dove behind the nearest charred hedge and took the long way around the park to the secret apartment he went to on days like this one. 

Walking barefoot in the city was yet another perk of being a superhero. No, actually it was horrible. After a few times Hulking out after stepping on sharp rocks and broken glass, Bruce's feet were gaining quite the calluses.

He spared a grateful thought that at least it wasn't snowing, but that small mercy did nothing to palliate his foul mood. He had been halfway through a proof when they'd been called out to do battle with the forces of mayhem, and when he got back, he'd have to start all over again to get on the same train of thought.  
An hour later, when Bruce was getting into his meditation-slash-pity-fest, an insistent banging began at his door.

The mystery knocker was very persistent, and Bruce's tenuous control on his temper wouldn't allow him to ignore them. He tried to remind himself that he didn’t actually want to wreck everything in sight.

Of course, it was all relative. People didn’t seem to understand that The Other Guy wasn’t a thing he could fix or wish away - his anger was a real thing, and it preyed on him when his defenses were down. His settings were either: well-rested and well-fed enough to control himself, frayed at the edges, or homicidal and green.

The most recent of people trying to “fix” him was Thor’s girlfriend’s lab assistant Darcy. Why she thought this was in her purview was beyond him and the methods she tried to use made very little sense. A week after Dr Foster started working in Tony’s labs, Darcy had bought him a game called Katamari Damacy to help "channel his destructive urges.” After a confused twenty minutes of cartoon gods from space that looked nothing like Asgardians, Bruce had failed to consciously or unconsciously want to roll everything rather than smash it, so he deemed it a failure. It took him a week and three times of walking in on Darcy playing it to realize that she had probably just wanted a reason to expense it – and the PS3 – on the Avengers credit card.

Bruce took a few deep, calming (not really) breaths and opened the door. On the other side was a bored-looking delivery man.

"Are you -" he squinted at a red cardboard card with a scribble inked across it. "- Doctor Bruce?"

Bruce frowned. "Yes?"

The delivery man shoved a to-go cup in Bruce's hand, nodded to himself at the job well done, and left before Bruce could gather his wits about him to protest.

New York City was a magical land that featured a very comprehensive delivery service, so the delivery of a drink was not a surprise in and of itself. A delivered drink implied a sender, however, and as no one was supposed to know this address, Bruce was suspicious. He held the warm cup in his hand and watched the delivery man disappear down the stairs. Sure, SHIELD had probably knew about this place, and Jarvis certainly knew his location within the decameter; however, SHIELD would secret their information away until a day they could use it as leverage, and Tony would just shove Bruce into a room full of whatever he thought he wanted. No one in his acquaintance would be this subtle.

When Bruce uncapped the cup, he found it full to the brim with whipped cream sprinkled with brown powder – chocolate? Cinnamon? Nutmeg?

Visually, it matched any of a number of drinks that had been foisted upon him this week as Darcy - who wasn't even technically his assistant, why was she in his lab all the time? - had decided that no one could be angry on a sugar high and had included him in her effort to try every drink on the Starbucks menu.  
Bruce lifted the cup to smell the drink. As he inhaled, he immediately knew what it was. He smiled and took a sip.

The kid had skill, he’d give him that much. It was probably a troubling sign that Bruce closed his door in higher spirits. Prolonged proximity to Tony Stark had obviously warped him as a person because the gesture seemed more thoughtful than stalkerish. The kid had somehow tracked down his cell and address, top secret information that could get someone thrown in jail for hacking into, all just to say hi. Either Henry was a genius or had no friends, maybe both.

Bruce sat down on his couch that afternoon with the hot chocolate in hand, with the thought that somewhere in Maine, there was a kid who could very well be a future analyst at SHIELD.


End file.
